Chapter Ten: Entropology

Abstract

This summary of the theory prepares for the final, considerably shorter chapters. It lays down the pieces of the puzzle in an entropology of human connectedness, impact and trust. Cultural, epochal specializations in distrust, futility and disconnection point to three types of entropy and six (structural and cognitive) subtypes.

The theory substantiates a longue durée explanation of post-knowledge in relation to the preceding transitions of the Neolithic and modernity. A ‘speciated history’ differentiates between social, cultural and existential validity. Human experience has over a period of 10,000 years been consecutively deprived of its connection with sources of production, spheres and frames. The ways to escape from the simplex through de-simplication are centrifugal. They restore the dependence of meaning, event and energy on respectively culture, network and life. Participants become aware. An alternative technique with the same purpose of pulling the simplex into a dynamic is centripetal. Participants reconnect their inner feelings to meanings out there in the world after the simplex contracts to the real.

The final chapters illustrate five tensors, each a way of centripetally regenerating social life (symbolized by the bundles of energy on the book cover). The discussed ethnography on divination already explained the technique of socially energizing. In each case an instance of contingency (or animate chance) removes all the clutter of symbolics and past speculations so that everyone and everything is in tune and the social situation can be rebooted. The reconnection of meaning and feeling strengthens trust and sense of impact.

A probably true but shallow analysis of the world today has it that we are witnessing the end of an era. The collapse of the West, in rigor mortis like the Roman Empire two millennia ago. The city of Rome burning. Nero. TrumPutin. Time has come for the next empire. It will introduce its own type of reign. China maybe.

What is really happening the state of the planet tells us. The very possibility of an equilibrium is at stake. Climate change represents a symptom. The acceleration of ecological disasters due to their interconnection has taught us a lesson about the world, the hard way. A lesson about society. Not only about our environment. It says that you and I may feel free, agents of our destiny, doing our best to become smarter, better or richer, but that we partake of something bigger, a whole. System. Organism. And that whole has been suffering from entropy, a disintegration affecting its core. School does not teach about it, for with every technological invention remedying a symptom, engineers are proving the atomism right of the natural sciences that distances us from the whole. Social science classes mock the very idea of a social organism, labeling it functionalism. Philosophers have long rejected the grand narrative of anything less fluid in life than fleeting semantics.

Anyway, somebody must have been wrong. There is that collective level of its own kind we ignored at our peril. System connotes equilibrium. One does not mess with the precariously balanced outcome of one million years of human evolution, the hard-won result of trial and error. One does not mess with Mother Earth. Our planet with water, atmosphere and oxygen is a miracle. (Statistically). Life is a miracle. Society is a miracle. We blew it.

Something snapped. Among the forms that ethnos, the swarm of cohabiting human and non-human animals, has taken in evolution, the band of hunters, the agrarian village, the industrial city and the suburb, none is objectively better than the other. These are shapes the organism took. Did the geological age of human influence, recently coined the Anthropocene, begin at the peak of industrialization? Or should we situate the year zero in the neolithic revolution, after masses of people turned to farming when the livelihood of hunters and gatherers collecting berries and shooting game in symbiosis with their environment ran into its limits under changed ecology? Each of these eras knew their costly initial phases. Transition to a new livelihood did happen every time again as war and poverty signaled the need for institutions to reach a new equilibrium; to freeze the nomos for a second and check out the logos, where it may falter and be reinvented. Changing a way of life is a collective exercise and a human craft. What hinders it? Never before has the species been as inventive, so the inertia is blatant.

How did we lose the feel for the craft? To recall the warning of combat pilots in the 1950s, adults in the past piloted communities continuously through difficult situations. Think of the equivalent for storms, engine failure, or a co-pilot’s heart attack. Each time, an individual managed to synthesize a great amount of data as well as emotions, much of it unconsciously, to take a wise decision, that is, to adapt the mode of production to the source of production. The acting on intuition strengthened the confidence of the entire group. Members swirled like a swarm. In simplicated designs however the user is babied. S/he has to think less hard and feel less sorrow or uncertainty. The response to a situation should be predictable. The design improves by reducing the user to a mere recognizer of signals and adopter of procedure. The feedback cycle is separated from the swarm. No learning or confidence building takes place in people. The feedback is limited to the technological sphere of exchange, because there would be different sources of production, corresponding to distinct spheres. Machines do their thing. We watch as the machinery surrenders society to entropy.

The dystopia of dehumanization already emerged in the romanticism of the late nineteenth century casting doubt, of an existential kind, on the modern cosmology that was conquering the world. Gothic novels captured the shadow thrown by progress optimism. Where can the unholy machine prosper? ‘For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest’, resounded the thought of Dr Van Helsing about Dracula.¹ Freud saw the thing, es, operating behind our civilized ways. The distinction between traditional and modern society contained a caution about human possibilities and limits that until well into the mid twentieth century inspired a series of classic studies. If not nostalgic, they were anti-hubristic tales of the destructive substance within our science and technology.² Worries of unseen dangers were tempered temporarily by postwar optimism and the rise in American and European welfare since the 1950s on account of industrial innovation (owing as much to exploitation of colonized territories). The background angst never went away.

Although machines enact and transmit cultural values that designers have incorporated, the complexity of multiple incorporations precluded the possibility of agency. Today, the dragging along of past measures in response to infinitely varied interests, which require ever more computation by abstruse bureaucracies, seriously hinders the tabula rasa that a worldwide ecological and social transition would require. To wit, parents educate their children about the global challenges only to return the next morning to their offices counting on being rewarded for mining the Earth’s opportunities, increasing a company’s sophistication in stimulating consumption, minutely exploiting the loopholes of regulations, and basically continuing with what they have been doing before. Too many spheres come in between for anyone to feel personally responsible for unemployment, dwindling incomes, injustice and the prosperity of the few that are jeopardizing the social contract. Society is this, humanity that.

We must face an important trait of entropy. The natural state of humans living together is for their group to dissipate. Entropy means that unless energy is imported, society undergoes a disintegration of the whole into parts. The tendency is toward fragmentation (e.g., scientific disciplines subdividing reality in niches to safely replicate their jargon) and homogenization within the fragments (e.g., markets settling for the unhealthy cheap supplies that satisfy the widest demand within a sphere). Markets, political parties and knowledge labs reduce humans to predictable identities in their spheres contradicting the palette of future possibilities across spheres.

Society will disintegrate into disorder unless energy can be tapped from outside. Therefore, living together is not a given but the result of organized collective unrelenting effort and ingeniousness. Through active practices of (re)integration, not just of newcomers but of all members, their minds evolving at each stage in their lives and adapting to the environment every time again, a society keeps itself alive. Otherwise it will disappear in Darwinian fashion. Cosmologies picture the group’s origins. Divinations measure a person’s (or group’s) energy or life-force (their ‘star’, nyota in Swahili). Ceremonies do not just take care of collective belonging but adapt the African rural group to the new phase of life the young members have reached. Each member in his or her way is needed by the group, irreplaceable. Imagine the confidence this builds in a person. In the millions of minute decisions dragged along in the current social network, the peaks and slumps of the market, the advices of experts and scholars, how many have taken that into account: the collective picture, the care for the state of the swarm? The social contract guarantees more TV channels, more car brands, more cheap clothes, more bandwidth, more PCs and phones and apps and information and social media platforms. In a population that has exceeded the scale of a community regulating itself, every decision and innovation that does not deliberately seek to reserve a unique place for each in society reinforces entropy. The simplex makes humans obsolete as subjects—the machine feels for you—while turning them into consumers mainly, tracking, creating and feeding addictions on every sensory terrain. The youngsters correctly register the daily message that they are not needed, save to consume and be exploited. Just watch the screen.

Correction. Twenty-first century technology is participatory: the exploited are exploiters too, influencers. The consumers simultaneously produce the pictures and films to like on Instagram or YouTube, and if successful make money out of these. To be exact, bloggers and vloggers produce civic cultures.³ Influencers feel like accomplices in exploiting the addiction to attention, fame and emotional reactions of awe, desire and jealousy, stimulated by images and headlines of sensation and shock.⁴ We all participate in the global experiment relying on our wise discretion as sensorily bombarded addiction-fed individuals to filter habits and trends. The information society has no filter to adapt the type and amount of informative and emotional input to what is good for its members.⁵ ‘Toddler suffers permanent brain damage from baseball in the face’ above a snapshot showing the child still held up high by the proud father right after impact, the shocked mother next to them: how much is needed of this every day at an hourly rate, with every flick on the smartphone screen, before the heart gets used to it, and feels no more? The tragic remedy is to subsume sensation, like gaming, in a sphere with a frame disconnected from life. The observer must disconnect from the reality of the toddler, his parents and us sharing an energy. Any system has its limits to what can be processed, bubbled and fragmented, without the system itself disintegrating. Humanity, really, does anybody believe in it anymore?

Look unassumingly at the scenes outside the school gates, around a McDonalds, in shopping centers, on the well-lit streets of town. Small waving screens attached to sleepless bodies. Eyes flashing at each other in disgust, or anxiety, then in cold detachment. I am one too many. Together, each deserted. Drugs designed to feel united.⁶ Eco-apo-calypso. To feel good, one joins the tide. The darkness is in us, but I see it less concealed in the kids of today. As I overheard one teenager in 2019 characterizing the group of peers: ‘Each wishes the other dead.’ The swarm has been affected by a deadly disease. The swirling dance has stopped. The members are not cooperating. They catch themselves thinking any member less is better for the swarm. Better someone else than me. The stress to make it. The nerves about not making it. The fight. The flight. Destructive or self-destructive. Retreat further, narrow down the sphere. A self-destructive cancel culture, one within the bubble, guarantees a steady stream of excluded. This is something no parent can deal with alone. It surpasses the advice of any pedagogical manual or the illuminating insight of any family therapy weekend. The darkness of bland, non-mysterious nothingness, is culturally transmitted as a disintegrating force, requiring constant effort specifically from the most sensitive young minds. Every day they do the invisible work of buckling up and restoring their wits to retrieve the light. Every day between the meshwork the toll becomes heavier. It is beyond their capacity, beyond anything one can reasonably expect. It is unprecedented.

Those youngsters are living the simplex. You and me are too, but adults have a way of normalizing what goes wrong. A simplex stands on itself. The recipient has little freedom, unlike a multidimensional being at the intersection of many interests. A human who lives the simplex can be compared to a laboratory rat that will be discarded now that all its capacities to respond afresh to the experiment have been exhausted. What does the lethargy tell us, the repetitive behavior in the cage? We are the rats.

Generations of Energy

A social network that fragments into bubbles and that spreads ideas uprooted from their original frame advantages dictatorship, ‘divide and rule’ and scapegoating. It undermines democratic reform and protest against tyranny and discrimination. The disparity between society and humanity grows. The hypothesis is corroborated if the latest age cohorts, those born between 1965 and 2015 named millennials and generation Z (zoomers), display a significant gap between the meaning they express and what they feel. They would have to excel in tokenism among others. They would strive for the appearance of equality by persuading a member of an underrepresented group to participate. They would let antigovernment protests subside before the goal is achieved. The talented activists among them would urge to be co-opted and work with international agencies. The gap should be bigger among the zoomers due to the growing of the disparity.

Then again, the corroboration can only be tentative precisely because of the hypothesized gap. The value of expressed opinions should over time be increasingly opaque. A survey unfortunately can only measure what the respondent expresses, and this via set meanings, also at the articulation of a feeling. Because surveys on cohorts measure opinions, not effects, Part I made the point mainly through comparison of what technologies and communications encapsulate. It resumed the anti-imperialist, anticolonial tradition of Max Gluckman’s Manchester School, founded on Marxism, a theory of the social system which however neglected cultural system. There is something profoundly cultural to the material. With this in mind I applied Gluckman’s theory on modern urban society dividing multiplex roles into simplex tasks. The core message of technological progress, as attested by the simplications, was that humans should be predictable. One-layered actions in an anonymous political or economic system reduce the complexity of humans having many roles at once, typically visible in a small community where judgment must be passed on someone who is also kin, cult member and neighbor. In the particular materiality of contemporary technologies an idea is inculcated: humans should be bypassed to avoid delays, for instance from ethical decision-making.

The theory to prove (or to refute) states that society is progressively taking the human sense out of the human. Firstly, behaving like a machine is rewarded. The most successful people on the planet incarnate the vectorial calculator. They are ‘one-trick ponies’ fitting new situations into the old mold, as in the listed neologisms, and getting so wealthy and influential that they infuse the world with their one-track mind. Secondly, the division of a multiplex situation into simplex acts tears apart the system it is part of. Automatize everyday activities with engines, from elevators to kitchen robots, and your muscles atrophy which you make up for in the gym, costing family time and money, the energy of the machines moreover to be compensated by pedaling the next day in the airport to charge your laptop battery, an apparatus produced in factories, whose pollution will be neutralized by other apparatuses the production of which no less weighs on the environment. Concern should not be with any human fault but with a flaw in the mechanism by which humans think to progress. The risk lies in the procedure of simplication. The complicated translation makes ideas, objects and activities ‘interlockable’ with other ideas, objects and activities, like Lego blocks. The units have cut reality apart and have adapted it, removing the bits sticking out, so they fit with other blocks: the office, the gym, the kitchen, the airport, the factory. Ethnographies describe these as dynamic actor-networks and as multilayered ‘lifeworlds’, but our society treats them as simplex, one-layered. The cutaway parts of each block come to haunt afterward in the form of disruptions that call for yet new inventions, like batteries and solar panels to make up for fossil fuels. The economy booms from the innovations while the knowledge of the dark matter of past decisions and goals fades.

Ethnography can retrieve the invisible stuff that simplexes simplicate away. That stuff consists of frames. The data of surveys do not speak for themselves, but with those frames they can be interpreted. What do the surveys indicate about millennials and generation Z? The two generations uphold more liberal values than the former did. The latest, generation Z, is more stressed, more concerned about climate, employment and personal performance, and trusts in the power of protest, in supporting and mobilizing certain flows of communication on social media.⁷ The flows are energies. Their urgency has to do with production sources being at risk. Distancing themselves, in two directions as it were, from old conservativism as well as from revolutionary hippiedom, the new generations are more issue-oriented than ideological, which might explain why European youth differs from American youth in focusing on migration, quite some of them voting for a far-right party that promises to solve the issue.⁸

An anthropological account can hardly be content with the dual analysis in terms of liberal/conservative.⁹ The continuum should be deconstructed as a conflation of dimensions. The two most probable candidates recurring in anthropology are the dimensions of agency/structure and idealism/materialism (for the first, see Geertz’s phenomenological critique of structuralism; for the second, see the debate between Marshall Sahlins and Marvin Harris).¹⁰ According to this two-dimensional approach to culture (including political views), the retreat from ideology means a move away from (ideational or material) structure and toward agency. By distrusting the state and valuing individual responsibility (the meritocracy in Hollywood movies), members of generation Z remind of the actor-materialism of neoliberals. But given their interest in eco-social sustainability, they more likely represent actor-idealism. This combination of two poles on the dimensions adds up to the view that the individual chooses among a palette of perspectives and, in curating the self, can transcend the material and ideational structures of respectively social class (dealt with by communism and old-style socialism, whose approach may be called structure-materialism) and cultural essence (defended by conservative parties applying the framework of structure-idealism). The actor shifts between perspectives, actively enabling diversity while identifying with one choice for an issue and protesting to that end.

The prototypical product of generation X would prefer to linger in irony or to swallow the pill of the most comfortable version of the matrix, like polished 80s music. A nihilist may feel free to change position, to create meaning, or to experience meaninglessness as meaningful.¹¹ For generation X, nihilism reflects a fate, ‘we are doomed’.¹² They are the parents suffering from anxiety and restraining their kids, keeping them at home, away from the doomed public spaces, leaving the kids no other option than to escape into virtual reality and find freedom in those games and platforms (whereby danah boyd counterintuitively revisits the guilt-inducing narrative of the gen X parents about their screen-addicted children).¹³ Might the dystopian portrayal in this chapter’s opening section, explored throughout Part I, be all too clearly the product of a generation X perspective? The latter’s hypothesis is that generation Z plays with energies but undergoes structure: the make-believe of the post-truth network habituates millennial and zoomer activists to spreading a correct meaning despite limited impact. The meanings spread by the new generations could not be more humane, but their revolutionary potential is low because of the fragmented network where each sphere reenacts its truth and where meanings can be uprooted from their social and ecological ties to support the feelings of any side.

The switch of perspective developed in the next final chapters is to recognize the importance of energies. A racist speech against sub-Saharan immigrants by Tunisia’s president almost instantly prompted a surge of energies in the form of antiracist demonstrations and crowdfunding for material support by civil society members.¹⁴ In response, the president toned down his speech, yet given the workings of simplex society one may expect the discrimination to continue secretly. The antagonism does not recede unless those in power sense that the demonstrators embody a collective reason they have not fathomed yet. The openness to learn may be a naïve expectation, and in any case not attainable through mutual accusation. From the perspective of the old prodemocracy movements, the potential for revolution today is the lowest in human history. However, what we observe in practice is that the convergence of communicative energies took the regime by surprise and curbed State violence. Elsewhere, around the same time, did the president of Israel not expect the military to join protests against his judiciary overhaul.¹⁵ His far-right coalition had sought to prevent an aforementioned effective strategy, the moving of spheres whereby a court overrules a government’s unlawful action. The show of collective reason, rooted in life-sensing, thwarted the government.

The vectorial influence by the Tunisian president and his state officials on the wider country ran into a vocal group’s matrixial display of what was really going on and had to be unmasked, the clash of racist and antiracist frames. What made the event tensorial though, and could positively awaken the wider population, was insight instead of fight: an understanding of what is right beyond group interests and individual reason. Remember how Miles’ disapproval of a gendered presumption of greeting terms contaminated a platform and unleashed affective energy in a war of words that generation Z is apt to manage. Members intra- and intermediated. They undertook life-sensing at that very basic, nodal level of the social network, namely the communications, to assess their toxicity; whether someone’s contribution passes the ‘vibe check’; whether ruining the mood is a worthy cause to actively ‘queer’ gendered conformism in the sphere; whether the atmosphere might be too ‘stressy’, replete with comparison and competition. Like with ‘goblin mode’, a sensitivity is shared about frames contaminating energies in super-wired spheres.

Something historical is happening. As the next section recounts, every major simplication of humanity into a lifeway had its impact on affect but also gave rise to a cognitive capacity. The neolithic stimulated a certain cultural creativity in cosmology and art. Industrialization engendered empirically based social engagement in civil society. The internet generations microscopically intervening in a hyper-wired world developed a special kind of life-sensing.

The Anthropocene: A Speciated History of Affect

In information theory, entropy refers to the rate of information a message transfers. In physics, the second law of thermodynamics stipulates that available thermal energy decreases with time. To speak of the Anthropocene is to note the accelerated entropy of life on the planet, and to hold human intervention responsible for this effect on biodiversity and living circumstances. A certain way of life has turned out unsustainable. A lifeway is a system, a whole, with reasons of viability at a collective level that individual reason may not fathom. Technocratic interventions apply the individual reason of experts. Earth’s atmosphere will be purer if solar panels in the desert liberate us from oil, a product of exploitation. Yet, the frame underlying the intervention is exploitative, so unforeseen side-effects may be expected. Should the system not be replaced altogether, by a new lifeway? Humans made such major transition in the neolithic, which in the same go however planted the seeds for the Anthropocene.

A collective type of intelligence is needed to adjust or substitute a way of life. Each lifeway follows from what the evolving (through natural selection) human species cognitively affords (structuralism) as well as from (functional) limitations to what is possible in a society and in a particular natural environment. (Note how the anthropologist can combine evolutionism, structuralism and functionalism which become extremes only when applied in isolation, just as the psychologist defines normality rather as a balance between neurosis and psychosis). Three anthropological turns can be imagined, and seem to be widely entertained by scholars outside the discipline.¹⁶ Although inevitably speculative and not essential for my argument, they provide a point of entry to simplex and tensor. Their history also shows how lifeways impact the dominant affect in a group. What else but nostalgia for a certain affect drives former teachers and IT engineers to ‘a return to Earth’ (retour à la terre), emigrate to Europe’s mountains and live as ‘neo-peasants’ (néo-ruraux) from farming and artisanal food making?¹⁷ Contemporary surrogates for the experience, such as hiking holidays, apparently do not suffice anymore for them. Why do former hunters, members of the !Kung-San people, in their modern settlements bordering the Kalahari desert long for their past way of life?¹⁸ From Graeber and Wengrow’s anthropological history of humanity, describing rapid cultural evolutions as well as reversions to simpler or so-called deserted modes of production, I infer (at variance with the authors) that the species has a palette of lifeways at its disposal, and affects to match.¹⁹

For a million years humans roamed to gather and hunt. Graeber and Wengrow emphasize the various constellations therein, plus the imbricating modes of production many thousands of years ago. Variety and imbrication do not alter the fact that in the roamer’s particular mode of production, life was experienced in direct exchange with the environment. The lifeway enabled a sense of impact and connection that could reproduce trust. The trust was existential, for ‘the world’ quite reliably provided in response to one’s efforts. A communal affect was possible that I recognize in Widlok’s comparative ethnography of contemporary hunter-gatherers, especially in their institution of sharing as distinct from gift-giving, exchange and reciprocity.²⁰ Do other lifeways have a surrogate for that affect?

In sedentary farming a basic degree of distrust may have been a safer attitude since crops could fail. Weeding, manure and slash-and-burn improved harvests, yet the rains might not come. Groups that invented religious systems and rituals during the season managed to sustain a firm belief in the future outcome. Without the daily direct experience of life, some of the energy that humans could count on dissipated. In response to the entropy, they developed a new ordering. A cosmology regulated communication with the sources of production such as water, forest, earth, sky, which were named and symbolized as spirits.

My interest is not in the often told story of cognitive mechanisms and their evolution, which obviously glosses over historical arbitrary singularity and spatial diversity.²¹ I want to understand the holism of a lifeway and what is sacrificed for it. A new lifeway solving an ecological crisis every time introduced knowledge about a different dimension of reality put under stress. The distinction between three dimensions is a product of that history: life (production sources), the social (sphere) and the cultural (frame). In the neolithic, farmers invented tensors such as sets of ritual activities and meanings, to maintain a relation with the sources of production, which savanna dwellers sensed on a daily basis and unconsciously lived. In modern cities, the subsystems that tore apart the peasant’s autonomy raised the issue of the spheres that people exchange in and are limited to. With unions, associations and civil rights movements, citizens created spheres that crosscut the subsystems. In the globalized information society, simplex energies attract (like there’s no truth to be found) and so we must learn about frames of experience. Let me outline the hypothesis a little more.

After giving up their dwelling in forests and savannas, humans responded to the energetic deficit by developing their intuition of spiritual forces as well as their exchange with life and the sources of production. Much of the old anthropological record deals with this intuitive knowledge, under the rubric of spirit cults, magic and witchcraft, divination, healing systems and cosmologies—ambiguously though because these practices eluded the empirical methods of science. What seemed like an ambivalent interest in alterity and the exotic, called salvation anthropology, was and still is for many participant-observing ethnographers the salvation of a human skill, a repressed side of the human. That is how I value the more recent so-called ontological turn in anthropology.²²

With modern capitalism and industrialization, the peasant type of autonomy disappeared. Futility lurked. How could the masses retain a sense of impact in the factory? The remedy was a social analysis, such as Marx’s, of worker’s conditions and a corresponding democratic intervention. Raising consciousness about the sphere one partakes of, like ‘the working class’, tackled industrialization’s random attribution of wealth. Prodemocracy and enfranchisement interventions as well as civil rights movements were possible. Prominently atheist, socialism rose at the cost of the energetic experiments in life-sensing, spirituality and mystical experience. These existential sensitivities could have been allies to prodemocracy, yet institutes such as the Vatican and Churches in general had appropriated them as religion, often to pervert them into doctrine. In the new undertow of prodemocracy, which seeks to complement the values of freedom and equality with that of inclusion, the existential sensitivity to collective reason could be an ally and an antidote to futility (see “Chapter Six: Collective Reason”).

The third boost of entropy we are currently witnessing in post-truth. The link is severed between meaning and feeling in frameless, one-layered ideas magnified and (ab)normalized at will, entailing polarization. Which cognitive skill should be improved, after peasants’ medicine made up for the loss of life-sensing and after activists’ social analysis tackled the hegemony of one class or sphere over another? My answer, quite simply, is cultural skills. A cultural analysis can restore the frame of experience and familiarize us with other people’s frames. Cultural skills can be wedded to the new forms of conscience derived from social analysis and life-sensing. In a planetary closed circuit (the atmosphere) all behavior including speech impacts life. On those grounds, generation Z adheres to ‘ethics at home’: no tolerance for racist innuendos behind closed doors; in the winter wearing an extra pullover in the living room; recycling a plastic cup also when nobody watches. Infiltrate the cocoon with conscience.

Figure 1 schematizes the evolution of lifeways in terms of effect on the dominant affect in a society and this at micro-, meso- and macro-level, moreover seen from the three-dimensional perspective of life-sensing, social analysis and cultural analysis. Details about the six subdivisions follow in the next section. To succinctly sum up, a lifeway is sustainable when firstly it generates trust as a background to activities, both in people’s use of the production sources of the environment and in the responses they perceive from the environment; when secondly the lifeway provides a sense of impact both via the spheres or groups humans communicate in (society-building) and via the consensuses reached within a sphere (reality-grounding); when thirdly it connects people’s feelings to the meanings they produce both through mediation of other frames (intermediation) and through awareness and introspection about frames (intra-mediation). The next section applies the theory to simplex society.

Fig. 1

Lifeways and affect in speciated history

Post-truth’s Sixfold Effect on Affect: An Entropology

The affects of distrust, futility and disconnection follow from three types of entropy: communication not in touch with the production source, communication locked up in a sphere, and communication frameless at the core (see three E’s in Fig. 2). Each entropy has two subtypes, structural and cognitive. Post-knowledge society suffers from all types of entropy at once.

Fig. 2

Three types of entropy (E) in simplex society

Background entropy (E₁) is source entropy. It concerns our tie with the sources of production, interrogating how we are relating to our environment in the background. The first subtype of source entropy is structural and refers to the extent to which our decisions are attuned to what happens around. An example is communication smothered in information overload and in an impenetrable net of regulations. Bureaucratic measures impose actions without the actors knowing their finality anymore. Passengers line up ‘for security reasons’ at the airport gate. They throw away their liquids over 100 ml, put out their shoes and remove their belt. They obey ready-made safety measures without questioning the reductionism of attackers supposedly limiting their options to liquids and metal objects. Since surveillance measures and policies officially abide by the will of the public through the constituencies of politicians, and their lobbyists and state-trained experts give their go-ahead, we assume that through compliance at every trip our future is in good hands. How many suicide bombers have been successful on planes since the security measures started after 911? Very few. Then again, how many of us have by accident passed the gates with knives, blades, insulin injections, or other objects with potentially lethal purpose? Many. Nobody in the global village has the overview to assess the necessity of the measures. Are the costs in personnel and time proportional to the extant intention of suicide bombers? Have bombers until now been nervously hanging around the airport gates while contemplating attack yet fearing to die prematurely? Nobody has a clue. The current scale of society is too big to assess the soundness of measures about someone’s intention. And so we drag along the technological advances, the subsequent strides we thought served more security. We are no longer in touch with the environment and its sources we are part of and reproduce (We fail to integrate micro and meso into macro). The norms on public forums are machine-regulated. Artificial Intelligence is struggling to distinguish frames, or spheres.²³ Since this socialization cannot be delegated to a machine, communication impoverishes. Everybody is shouting to be heard.²⁴ We fire away opinions until the network in the background renders our acts inconsequential.

Another part of our background trust is cognitive and concerns an expectation. The individual counts, for being a member of society and a group in particular. I belong to the human species (integration of micro into meso and macro). Critical remarks do not make me belong less to humanity and to the society comprising the sphere. This second subtype of background entropy appears when the social network looks like a giant actor, too impatient to bother about petty differences, personal or cultural. Securitization institutionalizes distrust. Surveillance increased across our post-911 social network. Everybody who ever logged into the internet can be retraced for security reasons (or for extortion). Henceforth Big Brother is a hypothesis we live with. You and I are no different from insurgents in that we have learned to sometimes hide our motives in online communications lest these be used against us someday. Indeed, as far as the state knows, digital natives may be paying lip-service to the state. ‘Russian’ and ‘Chinese’ trolls are trying to invade all important spheres of exchange to prime minds. The information society uses the knowledge because strives for undammed flows of communication to conserve and expand the social network. The entropy rages in the background. If someone’s communication has no informative value, the network distills information about the speaker, despite absence of context. A joke about a marginalized group is information that this person jokes about marginalized groups. By network I think of the communicative flow of hot topics and outrage trending on social media. Raw language from street culture is lifted out of the street and mis-framed by an information network unable to catch up with digital natives switching between spheres (aka ‘gangs’).

A second entropy affects the spheres (E₂), shown in the middle of Fig. 2. How do spheres of exchange lose their porosity and transform into subsystems or even bubbles, niches, cocoons? How do communications get so fragmented that they only serve members’ concerns and are limited to the sphere’s reality? Spheres of exchange, ranging in a variety from family and friends to public settings, form the passage to perceive the world. A communication connects members to a sphere (micro to meso) and thus grounds reality. For instance, the reality can be established of education as a tool of poverty-eradication thanks to the sphere of development studies bringing together various scholars and stakeholders. Academics astonished about xenophobic trends in their community should not underestimate the reality-integration they at least enjoy by participating in international conferences and research collaborations. The constant exchange keeps the feeling of futility at bay (and at those moments nuances this essay’s entropology). However, as the social network seeks to expand itself and therefore propagates cultural diversity beyond the nation-state, the flow of information tolerates diversity only within limits. A sphere catering for the likeminded (like-specialized) enhances the first subtype of sphere entropy, namely a fragmentation of reality, segregation instead of new arrangement. Whereas, formerly, citizens were represented via groups such as unions and political parties, the worldwide web permits internet surfers with common interests to find each other and set up a group, spanning the globe without limits of geography or language. The upshot of sharing affinity is not greater variety, nor porosity of spheres. Blogs within the niches address the likeminded, and although occasionally invaded by trolls and party-crashers, the normativity of the niche suffers little damage from the outside world.²⁵ The information society is an ideal breeding ground for niches delivering what the listeners want. The niches affect the network much less as a whole and thus could replicate otherwise unacceptable speech and beliefs. Clearly, ‘safe havens’ can mean many things. Could they breed extremism causing civil war? As long as the simplexes stay within their proper sphere of exchange, the danger of violence seems limited to members breaking out of the fold, such as lone shooters or suicide bombers.

Because simplexes aim at predictable reactions, they readily bloom in corners of the social network where they do not run into dissent. Some politicians push the reach of their simplexes beyond the sphere of their supporters, until they fail. As a case in point, populist leaders have been conspicuously unable to apply their divisive discourse to the Corona virus.²⁶ Sensing disapproval in wider spheres, a former US president soon gave up an early attempt at simplicating the pandemic as a ‘Chinese virus’.²⁷ The documentary by Michael Moore, ‘Planet of the humans’, and the vitriolic reactions by ecological lobby groups illustrate the growing separation between socialists and ecologists, which latter split up again in purists and commercially oriented pragmatists.²⁸ The accelerated fragmentation of ideas and social relations negatively affects reality-grounding, in this case of ecological communication.

Reality-grounding dovetails with society-building. Another term for the latter is feeling-integration (thus dovetailing with meaning-integration). What we imagine to be urgent interventions will come to effect only if the urgency is shared in a sphere that reaches society (meso to macro). The group’s members negotiate to determine a common reality concerning society and decide how to improve its situation. For instance, the aforementioned ‘education as poverty-eradicator’ aims at a collective project to build society. What obstructs the building of society are niches such as international political factions with their own news outlets, after the example of Fox News or football teams with their own TV channels, dodging critical interviews by neutral journalists from independent chains. The fragmented sphere offers a frame to perceive the issues, without the alternative frames ‘festering’ in our hearts. Society invisibly disintegrates as cultural diversification into spheres steers communication mainly toward members having the same frame.

Putnam’s study Bowling alone on the individualization and the disintegration of social capital illustrates the decreased sense of impact, the entropy at the meso-level.²⁹ His proposal to raise Americans’ social capital overlooks the point of modernity, which was to install citizenship in order to remove the need of reliance on informal solidarity networks. In the postcolonial states of the global south, social capital is crucial because trust in government is low.³⁰ In liberal democracies, the rights of citizens should be such that the individualization lamented by Putnam is possible. Citizenship stems from an abstract transfer to government, whereby needs are simplicated into rights. Individualization inheres citizenship. A state proves its hegemony by having spheres fragmented and deprived of impact on society.

Finally, the most recent tendency characterizing post-knowledge is frame entropy, or core entropy. A society disintegrates at the core (E₃ in Fig. 2) if members do not mediate their communication, which is to check a conveyed meaning with their feeling (second subtype, intra-mediation) and to exchange views with interlocutors (first subtype, intermediation). The outcome of mediation is feared to be unpredictable (“Chapter Seven: The Oracle and the Real” showed the seemingly obsolete practices of divination and initiation countering the first and second subtypes of core entropy). Fear of the real characterizes a knowledge economy predicated on information flows. An example of unmediated information is how surveys are used in public debate. What does the information network crave? ‘The frameless fact’ has been my answer. The average adult ready to vote has been bombarded in life by hundreds of surveys on numerous topics regarding the state of society. Some results have contradicted each other. Many repeated the mantras of a discipline. Few if none are remembered. Address anyone in the street about any topic and that person’s wild guess will hit right on target the mean of the normal (Gaussian) distribution of at least one marvelous survey. Surveys contend with too many data to be able to take each of them into account, so it is the researcher, a subject like you and me, who selects. The selections draw on frames (factors and themes in data analysis). In ecological debate, conservative and progressive voices choose respectively longer and shorter durations of climate-warming cycles to frame the human capacity at turning the tide. In statistics of crime by immigrants, the racialized reading will be less likely to factor in the role of social class and poverty. The choices of cycle and factor are the frames hidden behind the facts. When presented as frameless, an information can traverse spheres of exchange and reach planetary scale. A popular ‘frameless frame’ with globalizing potential is blame, carrying a reductionist claim of truth for a contagious reaction that guarantees copy in the media.

Frame entropy brings in the cultural dimension. It was prefigured early by anthropologists. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropology presupposes a contact of cultures and for this reason boils down to entropology, the study of (cultural) disintegration.³¹ The term featured in his travelogue Tristes Tropiques about Amerindians in the Amazon forest. In the 1930s, as rightist ethnocentric parties in Europe prepared for war, Lévi-Strauss experienced his own Western exoticism. In the two-way exchange with local people he could not control how his messages and the things he carried along would be framed. Over the years, he saw the effects of his stays, his local friends’ acculturation in norms and cognition, reinforced by the lure of his powerful gratification-oriented goods. He realized the ambivalence of himself being an outsider transforming the local culture by observing it. The same process of groups open enough to being invaded by new sets of ideas, subsequently being at a loss about what to believe anymore, occurs at unprecedented pace in the information society. The death of god(s) and spirits in modernity, and since secularization, boosted overseas exploration and the imagination about alien worlds in Europe and the US. Whence the urge?

Against the postmodern critique that cultures do not disintegrate but change, it can be argued that the one-sided slant of Lévi-Strauss’s entropology did justice to the easily overlooked logic that cultural elements form. Long forceful contact with an imperialist frame colonizes that logic.³² The simplications disintegrate into disconnected ideas and values, simplexes, which outsiders do not see the point of and therefore disrespect as obsolete traditions.³³ As “Chapter Twelve: Street Cred” illustrates, the entropy gives rise locally to frames of riposte, parody and counter-narrative, especially among artists with street credibility. Tensors of the undertow strive for an open system.³⁴ According to physics, a closed system naturally tends toward disorder. (The quantum physicist Schrödinger in 1946 therefore defined life as negative entropy.)³⁵ In a social context, entropy is the disappearance of exchange and therefore of difference.³⁶ Just as life is maintained on Earth, and entropy held back, thanks to the sun giving free energy, society taps from the sources of production provided by the human species. Access to the unknown of other cultures, of invisible forces, of the collective as a whole, and of affective dimensions between people, gives energy, which globalization and informatization block by excluding singularity.

According to Adam Smith’s beguiling metaphor of the free market, an invisible hand attunes supply and demand, guaranteeing an equilibrium in the interest of all participants. A similar assumption drives modern democracy. As long as individuals have freedom of speech, an equilibrium would be maintained. Collective reason instead implies that much of what society is about cannot be settled through opinions. Just as the market requires state intervention for redistribution, the species over thousands of years developed what keeps a group together through rituals, alliance systems, fora, and innovations in (or mixing of) livelihoods after forests and big game dwindled. Anti-conformists today strengthen the human tie with production sources, whether by living up a tree, picking up plastic from a beach, busking beautifully in a porch, rebuilding a deserted village, or giving free hugs on a square.

Contradictions prevail in a simplex society. Citizens feel uninformed and insecure, in a society whose core business is information and security. While individual freedom grew, actual agency was emptied out. While concern with humanity extended and deepened through multiple interconnecting platforms, the collective was not fed. The global village is anything but a village. Despite self-reflection and relentless ethical discussion putting the colonial views of intellectual ancestors to shame, the democratically elected parliaments condone the most insidious types of warfare, the criminal exploitation of the earth, fauna and flora by multinationals, as well as the dehumanized treatment of emigrants escaping the exploitation. Security is all that matters, yet none of us ever felt less safe.³⁷ Global crisis will not be overcome without a cultural revolution. Humanity will have to reinvent itself and adapt to a planetary way of life.

Reconnecting: The Final Chapters

The final five chapters examine World Cup football, Tanzanian hip hop, Pentecostal church services, dating sites and the collective imaginary, each an instance of reconnecting meaning to feeling. The popularity of these practices illustrates the predicament of living in a simplex society. In line with performance studies, I will argue that these are not purely escapist practices. They warm the muscle for collective experience, the minimal condition for eco-transition. Most of all, they foster de-simplication. Like in democratic elections, a sedimented arrangement is defused by organizing a moment of the real. International soccer games stage key moments of collective memory. In hip hop creativity and dissing, listeners feel inspiration, the muse, at work. The Holy Spirit lets some of the praying speak in tongues. Falling in love is two people in synchrony finding their destiny. Is a mass craze always a public delusion? When is it a spiritual encounter with the future?

Although the chapters will focus on each practice’s issue with fixity, the tensors can be said to restore affect ruined by simplex society. Watching a soccer game or a spontaneous rap or a mediumistic séance is a quick way of reality-grounding via group participation. It temporarily builds a social bond. It places trust in the environment of the big international game, music genre or church, and bolsters a general sense of belonging. It intra-mediates sensations during the event. It intermediates with the other viewers. The experience reconnects in the six ways during that fleeting moment. The following chapters illustrate how organizing the real not just enlivens. The tensor of the undertow brings the audience in perplexing contact with a collective experience once known as destiny.